Thursday, December 10, 2009

Obama Looks at Change From Both Sides Now

Yahoo! carries this headline: "Obama defends US Wars as He Accepts Nobel". The Norwegians seem to have taken an interest in US Politics. They gave the once-prestigious Nobel Peace Prize to Democratic Party politician Al Gore, who has gone around the world preaching falsified research in order to encourage adoption of a pollution trading scheme that will benefit himself personally. Now they give it to another Democratic Party partisan, Barack Obama, who lied to his followers and told them that he opposed the wars, and now he defends them, preaching the classical Orwellian saws "war is peace" and "change is stability".

Last year no one would listen to me when I called Obama a cheap Chicago politician with extremist left wing views. Now, that he is president, I will refrain from name-calling. Rather, let us view the Nobel Peace prize as a dead letter, much like the socialism of its administrators.

AP on Yahoo! writes:

"And yet Obama was staying here only about 24 hours, skipping a slew of Nobel activities. This miffed some in Norway but reflects a White House that sees little value in extra pictures of the president, his poll numbers dropping at home, taking an overseas victory lap while thousands of U.S. troops prepare to go off to war and millions of Americans remain jobless.

"Just nine days after ordering 30,000 more U.S. troops into battle in Afghanistan, Obama delivered a Nobel acceptance speech that he saw as a treatise on the use and prevention of war. He crafted much of the address himself and the scholarly remarks — at about 4,000 words — were nearly twice as long as his inaugural address."

1 comment:

His comments seem to imply that the foreign policy he has long advocated has failed, forcing him to alter his position, and perhaps even adopting the Republican stance. One can argue he has gone from far left to far right with his doctrine, even exceeding the Bush doctrine, which only argued for the preemptive use of force, but never only to fight a "just war," something declared illegal when the UN Charter went into effect.

It is interesting to deliberate whether his words, coming from the leader of the world according to some estimates, override existing international law and reinstate the traditional law of permitting force as long as it is part of a "just war." (I might write an article on this topic.) If this is the result, it would mean the Arabs, for example, could attack Israel whenever they desire as they are fighting a "just war." There was a reason this ancient law was changed.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.